Almost all supermarkets with full-service Deli departments use a manual “call-forward” queue-management system such as the “Turn-O-Matic” system sold by the Take-A-Number, Inc. Each customer pulls off a sequentially-numbered paper ticket from a preprinted roll in a dispenser to establish priority in a “first-come-first-served” service queue. Each ticket effectively represents a request for service by the service personnel to fulfill an order for goods, and service personnel satisfy these requests for service by “calling forward” each ticket number to be served in sequence, usually by verbally announcing the queue number and pushing a button to increment the “Now Serving” number on an overhead sign. The customer then answers the call and places the order with the service person, usually verbally, for immediate fulfillment.
More and more supermarkets are also offering customers the option of placing their Deli orders through computerized ordering software via a computer, e.g. a “kiosk” computer. Each placement of an order through such computerized means is also a request for service, and the computer acts as an intermediary for the customer in actually placing the order with a service person for fulfillment, usually by printing the contents of the order on a printer behind the deli counter. In theory, the use of such computer-ordering systems should provide significant benefit to both the customer and the retailer. Customers can benefit by saving time, since they do not have to wait in line to place their order, and also by being able to take as much time as they want to browse and order items. The retailer can benefit by reducing labor costs, since the service person doesn't have to take time to interact with the customer, and also by increasing sales. The increase in sales is due to two factors. First, some customers will place their order through a computer who would otherwise not be willing to wait in line. Second, customers are known to place larger orders through a computer than at the counter, primarily because they don't feel pressured by customers behind them in the queue to complete their order quickly and take more time to browse and think of more items to buy.
However, managing customer-service levels using queue-management and customer-ordering systems as described above is complicated by two major problems: lack of service-level performance information, especially in real time, and the fact that “counter customers” and “kiosk customers” create two separate and competing service queues. The result of these problems is reduced profits due to lost Deli sales, higher operating costs, and diminished benefit from those computerized ordering systems.
Prior-art electronic call-forward queue-management systems, such as is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,059,184 or those sold by market leader Q-Matic AB of Sweden, can provide a wealth of real-time service-level performance data, and can also provide another significant customer benefit by displaying an estimate of the queue-waiting time for a new customer joining the queue, and can manage multiple different service queues. However, all such prior-art systems support only one ordering channel for any given service queue and so can provide this information only for customers in that channel. In an environment with multiple ordering channels, this lack of visibility of the interaction between the two service queues becomes problematic. For example, measurement of order-fulfillment times and server-productivity, as well as estimates of queue-waiting times, will be significantly in error if the service personnel are filling orders from both counter customers and kiosk customers but the queue-management system that is performing the measurement only “knows” about the counter customers.
A much more severe problem not solved by prior-art, single-channel queue-management systems is that of rationalizing and systematizing the service priority between the multiple channels. Since the same pool of service associates must satisfy service requests from both counter customers, who are waiting in the ticketed call-forward service queue, and from kiosk customers, whose orders have been printed by the deli printer, these parallel ordering channels create two separate queues that compete with each other for service. Without any systematic method of assigning relative priority of service between the service requests in the different queues, service personnel are forced to use their own best judgment in the allocation of their services. Especially during periods of peak demand, there will be a natural tendency for them to give priority to counter customers, for two reasons. First, counter customers are more visible, since they are standing right across the counter, whereas kiosk customers are present only in the form of paper coming out of the printer. (As queue-waiting times increase, counter customers may well become more vocal as well.) Second, service personnel will likely rationalize that they can delay in filling orders from kiosk customers since those customers are shopping and don't need their orders filled as quickly.
This situation gives rise to a number of unfortunate consequences. Kiosk customers will all too often return to pickup their Deli order at the conclusion of a shopping trip only to find that it has not yet been filled. Such customers will conclude correctly that they cannot rely on their kiosk order being filled and will frequently either revert back to waiting in the counter-service queue on future shopping trips or stop ordering from the Deli altogether. In most cases in which the fulfillment of a Deli order is so late that a customer is forced to leave the store without it, the order will have to be thrown away, resulting in waste of both the product and the labor cost of fulfillment. On the other hand, counter customers may become offended when they see service personnel turning to fulfill orders from the printer instead of calling forward counter customers, thereby perceiving service to be unfair, perhaps even to the point of verbally criticizing the service staff for this perceived slight and/or discontinuing patronage of the Deli (or even the store). The pressures of balancing service between the two queues, using their own best judgment, places considerable stress on service personnel and degrades job satisfaction. One strategy of coping with this stress, often exhibited by these workers, is to sabotage the computerized ordering system in some way. For example, they may place a bag over the kiosk computer screen with “Out of Order” written on it, or disable the printer. Reducing the availability of the computerized ordering system reinforces the customers' perception that it is not a reliable ordering channel, further diminishing its benefits.